Admittedly, most big corporations end up in a courtroom sooner or later, but Nintendo has a particularly knee-jerk history when it comes to inflating its legal balloon... as well as often being on the opposite end of the statutory balloon-bounce from others.
Here are 7 times Nintendo felt the need - the need for speed (to unleash its lawyers).
Nintendo sued Galoob, the makers of Game Genie, for copyright infringement, stating that modifying its existing games constituted creating a derivative work.
After a year of debate - during which time the Game Genie wasn't allowed to be sold - the judge ruled in Galoob's favour, likening the Game Genie to "skipping the pages of a book", or something. Nintendo was ultimately forced to pay $15 million to Galoob to account for its 12 months of lost revenue.
Silly Nintendo.
Like Nintendo was ever going to care about the paupers.
In 1989, having already succeeded in getting video game rentals banned in Japan, Nintendo turned its beak to the rest of the world - and tried to get Blockbuster Video to stop renting out its games.
Nintendo lost the case, but won a small concession; Blockbuster wouldn't be allowed to bundle original manuals with its rentals, thus customers had to make do with dreadful photocopied reproductions, and a hand-drawn image of some chard.
It wasn't always the case. In 1982, Universal sued Nintendo, alleging that its Donkey Kong character infringed upon the King Kong movie franchise. The judge ruled in Nintendo's favour, stating that the rights to King Kong - created by RKO in the 1930s - did not reside with Universal in the first place, and actually belonged in the public domain.
"Donkey Kong's particular expression of a gorilla villain and a carpenter hero (with or without a fire hat) who must dodge various obstacles (whether bombs or fireballs) while climbing up ladders (whether complete or broken) and picking up prizes (umbrellas or purses) to rescue a fair-haired (whether knotted or pigtailed) hostage from the gorilla is protractible against Universal and its licensees," he screamed, like a terror-stricken swine (with or without a fire hat).
According to Atari, game makers were forced to "yield to coercion from Nintendo, so that Atari and other manufacturers of video game consoles are unable to obtain many popular games for use on their own systems".
The complex case revolved around who had the rights to release Tetris on the NES - Nintendo or Tengen.
Atari objected to Nintendo's policy of only allowing official licensees to make games for its machines. Nintendo launched a countersuit, which prevented Tengen from releasing games on its systems without an official Nintendo license. The judge ruled in Nintendo's favour, forcing Tengen to destroy almost 270,000 copies of their version of Tetris, and allowing Nintendo to release a less-good version of the popular Russian block-dropper.
He claimed: "Nintendo turned me into an evil, occult Pokémon character. Nintendo stole my identity by using my name and my signature image."
Geller additionally claimed that markings on Kadabra's body were antisemitic in nature.
Astonishingly, the case has yet to be resolved, almost 20 years on. Consequently, Kadabra has been quietly retired from Pokemon titles and media, while Geller has gone on to threaten others with stealing his likeness - including IKEA, which released a table with bent legs that it dubbed "Uri".
Ironically, upon receiving the news of the company's defeat, many Nintendo executives immediately fell over.
Following legal threats by Nintendo, creators may no longer live stream Nintendo games through YouTube - even if they have registered with its controversial Nintendo Content Creators program (which allows YouTubers to a share of advertising revenue - split with Nintendo - providing they adhere to Nintendo's terms).
Frankly, this may be the most heinous peak of Nintendo's legal fatuity.
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